Internet activists vowed to crash sites that have blocked business with WikiLeaks and PayPal, and others saw sporadic outrages.
Attorney General Eric Holder said U.S. authorities were looking into cyber attacks on companies like Amazon.com and others. "We are aware of the incidents," he said.
The teenage boy was arrested by a high-tech crime unit in The Hague after admitting to attacks on the websites of two credit card companies, MasterCard and Visa, the prosecution in the Netherlands said on its website.
The suspect, whose details were not disclosed, was believed to be part of a larger group of hackers under investigation that participated in so-called denial of service attacks, the prosecution said. Data and computer equipment were confiscated during his arrest.
The loosely organized campaign to avenge WikiLeaks against those who have obstructed its operations, calling itself Operation Payback, has already temporarily brought down the websites of Visa and MasterCard, and of the Swedish government.
A succession of U.S. institutions has withdrawn services from WikiLeaks after the website published thousands of sometimes embarrassing secret U.S. diplomatic reports that have caused strains between Washington and several allies.
In Moscow, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange showed the West was hypocritical in its criticism of Russia's record on democracy.
When asked about leaked U.S. diplomatic cables that cast him as Russia's "alpha-dog" ruler of a corrupt bureaucracy, Putin questioned whether the U.S. Foreign Service was a "crystal clean source of information."
WikiLeaks activists instructed their followers on Thursday to mount a distributed denial of service attack on a PayPal website that manages the integration of the company's payment processing technology with independent online merchant websites. PayPal is a subsidiary of eBay.
A PayPal spokesman said the company had detected an attack on the site, http:/api.paypal.com, but that it appeared to be operational, although various attempts to access the website by Reuters on Thursday were unsuccessful.
Online retail and web-hosting powerhouse Amazon last week stopped hosting WikiLeaks' website, and on Thursday it briefly became the main target of the pro-WikiLeaks campaigners -- before they admitted it was too big for them, for the moment.
"We cannot attack Amazon, currently. The previous schedule was to do so, but we don't have enough forces," read one message on Twitter.The activists said they would instead attack PayPal, which has suspended the WikiLeaks account the organization had used to collect donations. MasterCard and Visa had also become targets after stopping processing donations.By early evening EST (1810 GMT), the main websites of PayPal, Amazon -- a key Christmas shopping destination -- MasterCard and Visa all appeared to be functioning normally.
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